Robert Frank

When Robert Frank passed away in 2019 aged 94 it was the end of a long and successful career as a photographer and filmmaker. In 1947 he left his country of birth, Switzerland, for New York and a job as a photographer at the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Only a few years later he was part of the 1951 exhibition ‘51 American Photographers’ at MoMA in New York, curated by the legendary Edward Steichen. During the 1940s and 50s Frank was included, with Diane Arbus, Lisette Model and Weegee, amongst others, in the group often referred to as ‘The New York School of Photography’. His restrained and sometimes gritty black and white images of cities and urban life were combined with typically American imagery from the countryside and smaller communities, as well as with portraits.

In 1955 he was again selected by Steichen to include as many as seven photographs in the world-famous touring exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, which started at MoMA in New York. In the years that followed the show toured no fewer than 150 locations around the world and is believed to have been visited by more than 10 million viewers. That same year Frank was awarded a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in order to be able to travel around the United States and take photographs. During the two-year period he worked on the project he took as many as 28,000 images, of which only eighty-three were chosen for the book ‘The Americans’.

The image in the auction, ‘Covered Car, Long Beach, California, 1956’, is one of these shots. It is also one of Frank’s most famous photographs. Frank took many pictures with cars and was fascinated by the American people’s love for their cars, something he had not encountered growing up in Europe. In the image we see a parked car covered by a protective sheet and flanked by two Californian palm trees. The sheet is used to protect a valuable asset, but in his book Frank contrasts this photograph with the image of a covered victim of a traffic accident in ‘Car Accident—U.S. 66, Between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona’.

The book was first published in Paris in 1958, with the title Les Américains and accompanied by text written by Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck, amongst others. The following year it was published in the United States. A new introduction was written by the well-known Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who was a close friend of Frank’s. It is today regarded as one of the most important books of the 20th century and as a landmark in the history of photography. It has influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers and writers. In the introduction Kerouac actually commented on the imagery of Covered Car, Long Beach, California, 1956: “Car shrouded in fancy expensive designed tarpolian to keep soots of no-soot Malibu from falling on new simonize job as owner who is two-dollar-an-hour carpenter snoozes in house with wife, and TV, all under palm trees for nothing, in the cemeterial California night”.

The years after The Americans was published were hectic. In 1961 Frank had his first solo show, ‘Robert Frank: Photographer’, at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1962 he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, in the 60s Frank more or less stopped taking photographs and began making films instead. His most famous film, the documentary about the Rolling Stones, ‘Cocksucker Blues’, from 1972, never had a premiere. It was made in connection with the band’s album ‘Exile on Main St.’, where Frank’s images could be seen on the cover. He has also directed music videos for New Order and Patti Smith amongst others.

In 1994 The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. opened the largest exhibition of Frank’s work to date. In 1996 he was awarded the Hasselblad Award with the following citation: “Robert Frank is one of today’s leading visual artists. He has contributed to a renewal in the fields of both documentary and fine art photography and within ’independent American film art’. Having as his starting point the objective realism of the art of the 1930s, Frank has pursued his distinctive search for truth, whatever the medium, with determination and consistency. His pictures have had a decisive influence on generations of photographers, painters, filmmakers, critics and writers”.